News

Recent successful cybersecurity attacks, such as the 2010 Stuxnet attack on uranium centrifuges central to Iran’s nuclear program, have made it impossible to ignore the lack of effective security of cyber physical systems today.

ITI researcher Alejandro Dominguez-Garcia won a 2014 Campus Distinguished Promotion Award, an honor from Provost Ilesanmi Adesida. The award recognizes recently promoted faculty members who have shown special promise in their fields.

ITI Researcher and CS Professor Vikram Adve has been named a 2014 Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). In his citation he was recognized “for developing the LLVM compiler and for contributions to parallel computing and software security.” He is one of 49 ACM members being recognized this year for their contributions to computing.

Securing our power grids from malicious attacks is critical to ensuring a safe power grid, and many researchers are working on solving this problem by focusing on the entire system. However, ITI research scientist Katherine Davis is tackling the problem in a new and innovative way in her new $391,014, three-year NSF grant to study verification of cyber-physical critical infrastructures at the device level.

CS graduate student Man-Ki Yoon received the Roberto Padovani Scholarship from Qualcomm. The Roberto Padovani Scholarship program was created in 2008 to recognize Qualcomm Research interns who demonstrate extraordinary technical talent during their summer internships.

ITI faculty members Dan Roth and William H. Sanders are two of six University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign faculty members have been elected 2014 Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The other recipients were Placid M. Ferreira (Mechanical Science and Engineering), Brendan A. Harley (Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering), Joseph W. Lyding (Electrical and Computer Engineering) and Phillip A. Newmark (Cell and Developmental Biology).

CSL Professor Sayan Mitra (ECE) and CS Professor Mahesh Viswanathan were recently awarded $500,000 from the National Science Foundation to support a grant entitled “From Simulations to Proofs for Cyberphysical Systems” that will seek additional ways to verify such systems in conjunction with simulations.

With a tight gubernatorial race in Illinois, voters are being bombarded today with TV ads, yard signs and robo calls. But what if candidates could use their campaign dollars to subtlety influence your vote on social media? It might as simple as paying to promote the status of a friend who just voted or downplaying negative status posts on Facebook.

It's tense in the situation room. A cyber attack on the electrical grid in New York City has plunged Manhattan into darkness on a day that happens to be the coldest in the year. Concurrently, the cellular phone network has been attacked, silencing smartphones and sowing confusion and panic. A foreign power has claimed responsibility for the attacks and says more are coming. Your job is to look at geopolitical factors, intelligence feeds, military movements and clues in cyberspace to predict what may be happening next. Your goal is to make a recommendation to the President.

When an energy company sustains a cyber attack, control system operators must quickly identify, isolate and reroute around the affected network areas in order to maintain critical energy delivery functions. A global view of all communication flows would make that task much easier, but unfortunately, such an overview map isn’t available to the energy sector at this time.

Graduate student Yutian Lei won the award for best paper out of 128 peer-reviewed contenders at the 2014 IEEE Workshop on Control and Modeling for Power Electronics, or COMPEL, which took place at the University of Cantabria in Spain. Lei’s publication, co-written with former graduate student Ryan May (now at Texas Instruments) and ITI researcher and Assistant Professor Robert Pilawa-Podgurski, explored their research into switched-capacitor power converters.

Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign are seeking to accelerate the technology transfer processes – perhaps by as much as 50 percent – through a new grant funded by the National Science Foundation.

The best way to combat cyberattacks may be a joint public-private partnership between government and business, says a new paper from Jay Kesan, the H. Ross and Helen Workman Research Scholar at the University of Illinois College of Law.

CSL researchers received the inaugural Best Paper Award at last month’s 2014 IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN). Additionally, graduate student Cuong Pham was recognized for his outstanding PhD research in this area and was awarded the William C. Carter Award at DSN.

Cristina Abad, a May 2014 computer science Ph.D. graduate at Illinois, has developed a benchmark designed to model the performance of next-generation storage systems, called MimesisBench, which was featured in ITWorld and PCWorld.